ActionAid UK, the international charity working to achieve social justice, gender equality and poverty eradication, this week launches its bold new fundraising campaign, Side by Side, which champions the inspiring women rebuilding their lives after crisis.

Amid rising anti-refugee rhetoric both in the UK and abroad, the campaign calls on viewers to “stand with women across borders, side by side” by committing to a regular donation that helps displaced women establish new livelihoods.

After two years off air, ActionAid UK returns to TV with a powerful message that centres the authentic experiences of women, amplifying their voices as they tell their own stories in their own words.

The number of forcibly displaced people has almost doubled over the last two decades, standing at one in 67 people globally, according to UNHCR – with women and girls among those most at risk.

ActionAid UK partners with women-led groups who work alongside women refugees, helping them to rebuild their lives with dignity and strength, as well as support other women.

The Side by Side film highlights the compelling stories of two remarkable women:

• Gloria, who fled conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo and found refuge in Uganda, where she trained as a tailor and now inspires other women to do the same.
• Leokadia, who escaped the war in Ukraine and found safety in Poland, where she set up a cooking academy to help other refugee women earn an income.

Their stories demonstrate how regular donations to ActionAid empowers women to take control of their futures, support their families and strengthen their communities.

The campaign will run across national TV, with media planning and buying managed by MI Media.

Sabina Basi, Funding Director, at ActionAid UK, said: “At ActionAid, we believe that all women – anywhere in the world – deserve a life of dignity and hope. Side by Side celebrates women’s resilience and leadership, as well as the tangible impact they make to their communities — and calls on all of us to stand with them in solidarity, not as victims of crisis, but as agents of change.”

You can read about media partnerships we’ve developed for ActionAid here and here.

This month’s day in the life is with our finance director, Jerome Charles. In our chat, Jerome speaks to us about the route he took into finance within the advertising industry and how what you see as mistakes changes as your career evolves.

What led you to a career in finance?

I was good at numbers throughout school and a maths degree followed which led me into a career in sales. Unfortunately, while I liked the idea of it, it turned out I wasn’t particularly good at sales. When a job opened up in the accounts department at the same company it was a no brainer, I jumped at the opportunity. Accounting felt so much more comfortable to me. I am far happier looking at a spreadsheet rather than writing a speech or presenting a deck.

That first role was in a company selling knowledge on the property overseas market. After the 2008 recession, the company went through a tricky time and, even though I was still junior, I became the sole person on the finance team. I left to go travelling and when I returned, after a finance role in theatre turned out to be surprisingly corporate, I was offered a role in the media industry. It was an eye opener into a much more interesting industry for me in a far more relaxed environment. I was also lucky to begin working under a great finance director who I followed to subsequent roles.

What does a typical day look like for you?

One of the beauties of finance is that there are specific deliverables which give your days and weeks structure. In my role as finance director, I must strike the right balance between the strategic: planning, forecasting and performance, and the supportive: making sure that every stakeholder in the business has what they need to do their jobs. A huge part of my role is supporting my team and the SLT with their work, I have to manage that while bringing a strategic financial perspective across different areas of the business.

What mistake have you learnt the most from?

As you progress through your career ladder, I think what you see as mistakes changes. I remember earlier on in my career I would have said that accuracy is king. When the primary part of job is transactional then you want to be as accurate as possible. As your career develops you begin to understand that trying to be too accurate can in itself be a mistake. As an FD, you shouldn’t be aiming for everything to be perfect before broaching an idea. It’s far quicker and more effective to develop your ideas until they’re 90-95% there, then open them out to collaboration with your MD and senior leadership team to get them over the line. It’s a mistake for any FD to put the responsibility for anything solely on themselves.

Who’s your role model and why?

My old FD who I have worked with a couple of times over the years, Sukhdev Poonian, was fantastic. We worked together for six or seven years and in that time, he took me from being a quite green in junior accounting to a senior management level. What was nice about our relationship was that while I was on that journey, he had a massive impact on me in terms of technical capability, but I also had an impact on him too as he became a much more extroverted and confident FD. We worked incredibly well together and took a lot from each other. I really enjoyed seeing him grow into both a well-rounded and button-tight, technical accountant while also working on his commercial and personal side. Seeing that example of someone senior that was still developing who they were as a professional has stayed with me throughout my career.

This week we launched a powerful new fundraising TV advert with international humanitarian organisation, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). The campaign highlights what it means to donate by reinforcing the life-saving impact of regular giving.

The campaign, created by krow Group, is a bold step forward for the charity’s communications, bringing donors inside the action. With the aim of increasing monthly donations, the ad highlights the importance of donations, and how they directly impact MSF’s ability to deliver long term, independent medical aid in areas affected by conflict, disaster and disease. The ad will run across TV, VOD and Social as part of MSF’s wider Winter Campaign, in rotation with ‘The Life Saving Moment’ ad, launched in October.

Amid an overwhelming backdrop of global crises, ‘Part of the Team’ invites viewers to see themselves not as passive bystanders, but active participants. The emotionally charged film transports a donor from her living room into MSF’s world.  It places them inside an MSF frontline operating theatre, shoulder to shoulder with medical staff, to feel the urgency, witness the stakes and experience what it means to play a vital role – not as a bystander, but as part of the team.

Told through a minimalist, spot lit visual language and using sound to seamlessly transition the donor between the comfort of home and the urgency of the frontline. It captures both the emotional weight and the importance of MSF’s work. The message is simple but powerful ‘Stand with Us’.

Michaela Campion-Smith, Acquisition and Emergency Fundraising Lead at Médecins Sans Frontières said, “We know people want to help during times of crisis but often feel disconnected from the impact they can have. This film bridges that gap, showing that when someone donates, they’re not just giving money, they’re stepping into the story, becoming part of the team that saves lives.”

You can read about how we increased MSF’s donations by 50% YoY with last year’s winter appeal here.

Following the launch of OpenAI’s TV campaign, business director Annabelle Sitwell spoke to The Media Leader about how this move follows in the footsteps of many other tech giants before it.

It feels like OpenAI has broken its own fourth wall, stepping outside of its virtual world and into a world that it’s had us believe was nothing but a distant memory… linear TV.

Whilst much has been made of OpenAI’s move into TV, it seems to me that this was the logical next step. Fellow tech giant Google has always run high-budget, emotion-led traditional media advertising. Its TV ads focus on the humanity behind the searches and it’s often leant heavily into OOH to showcase its live data feeds with hyper-localised weather or traffic data.

Digital channels bring early adopters, traditional advertising deliver mainstream reach

This is the natural progression of a tech product launch. Using digital channels in the first instance to get early adopters onto the platform whilst every element is going through beta enables the team to optimise processes like product features, UX and pricing strategy. It’s important to remember that ChatGPT is likely still in its relative infancy – even though we’re already on v5! According to itself, it was first launched in 2018, but it was the 2020 version that garnered global attention. In a world where engineers need real usage data to optimise and roadmap new features, managing a gentle but steady growth curve is best. It’s important to remember how slow and often inaccurate the early versions were. Large uptake wasn’t an option. However, with all future-facing products natural growth will plateau (the same was seen with electric cars). And with large investment rounds it needs to gear up for the next level. This is the moment when brand campaigns across trusted advertising channels will deliver the mainstream reach these platforms need to become universally used.

Channel effectiveness: knowing what works and by how much

At its core, MMM quantifies how each media channel contributes to incremental sales or conversions. Using historical data on spend, impressions, sales and external factors such as competitor activity; MMMs estimate the ROI of a channel. In Bayesian, something called a posterior distribution is generated, which represents a range for the ROI of that channel, not just a single point estimates (e.g. the ROI for TV is likely between 2 -2.4).

The key metrics that emerge include:

• ROI (Return on Investment): incremental revenue per pound spent on a channel
• Elasticity: how responsive sales are to percentage changes in channel spend
• Credible intervals: the probability range for each channel’s true ROI (e.g. 50% probability that the true channel ROI lies between 2- 2.2)

For decision-makers, this means more than just knowing ‘TV performs better than social’. The outputs allow clients to ask their media agencies, “how confident are you that TV performs better than social?”

Response curves: finding the point of diminishing returns

One of the most valuable outputs of an MMM is the spend-response curve. These show how each channel’s performance scales with increased spend, capturing aspects known as ad stock (how long ads keep working after airing) and saturation effects (when returns diminish at higher channel spends).

These are estimated through nonlinear transformations made to the data using specialist functions which describe how a KPI approaches a plateau as media spend increases. Put simply, it tells you how much is too much (over-saturation) and how much is too little (under-saturation).

These curves help media agencies and their clients:

• Identify optimal spend levels per channel before diminishing returns kick in
• Understand marginal ROI at each channel spend level
• Recognise under- and over-invested channels which helps optimise spend
• Build intuitive ‘what-if’ scenarios showing the incremental revenue for different media budget channel splits or scenarios

MMM takes marketers from intuition to evidence-based decision making

The re-emergence of MMMs helps marketers use data to move from intuition-based to evidence-based media investment decisions. When MMMs are built robustly and are validated by channel experts, they undoubtably enable smarter media planning. MMMs help marketers answer key business questions such as where to spend more or where to cut and how confident we are in the return on our investment.

Modern MMMs, using techniques such as Bayesian, provide outputs alongside uncertainty. This is powerful because levels of risk can be communicated alongside more typical MMM outputs such as channel saturation, budget optimisation and scenario analysis.

At MI Media, MMM outputs are communicated to clients in MIDAS, our automated reporting dashboard which adds interactivity, allowing our clients to play with ROI tables, response curves, KPI contribution charts, budget optimisation scenarios and more. While this adds a useful interactive element over traditional presentations, it’s still important that we work closely with our clients to discuss the key business findings and how they will affect future media decisions.

Our latest membership campaign with the Woodland Trust launched earlier this month, encouraging everyone across the UK to enjoy the autumnal drama of our woods. The campaign highlights that, by becoming a member of the Woodland Trust, people can help protect and ensure the safety of our woodland’s trees and wildlife for years to come.

As the UK’s largest woodland conservation charity, the Woodland Trust already has strong brand awareness, this latest campaign needs to move audiences down the funnel to consideration and conversion.

To give people a reason to act now and become members, our Woodland Trust membership campaign will use contextual placements that build on moments of heightened emotion when people are learning about the issues and paying attention to the issues we’re facing.

To reach a combined audience of those that actively campaign for greener living as well as those that make small, conscious choices in their days to be greener but don’t actively campaign, the Woodland Trust membership campaign will run across highly contextual and engaging channels including radio Do Good Trails across the Heart network, on podcasts including That’s Just Wild & The Plodcast and in content partnerships with the Guardian and the Telegraph. We have also partnered with Goodnet, an ESG platform that curates YouTube creator lists based on the full spectrum of ESG that will place the Woodland Trust against better quality, contextual content while lowering its carbon footprint for the digital activity.

You can read more about our appointment by the Woodland Trust here.

In-person events are coming back with a bang but hybrid continues to be the best strategy 

It has been five years since the pandemic changed the face of events. 2020-2022 saw the very quick emergence of virtual events, out of survival necessity. Whilst hybrid events are here to stay (for now!), we are seeing in-person events return to popularity.  

For example in the case of charities, the UK events fundraising market appears to have shifted back to in-person experiences. In-person events made up 90% of the Top 25 Charity Events that raised the most money last year. Several in-person walking events, such as The Kiltwalk, Shine Night Walk (CRUK), and Memory Walk (Alzheimer’s Society), featured in the Top 25. In stark contract, according to JustGiving, the average amount raised per page for virtual walking events in 2024 declined. Whilst in-person is coming out as the clear winner, many charities are keeping virtual events in the mix, likely due to the cheaper running costs, meaning events remain hybrid. 

Conferences remain in demand 

For our B2B clients, there is still great demand for in person-conferences. According to Events.com, “In 2025, events that help people grow, professionally or personally, are seeing strong demand. Career networking nights, skills-based workshops, and learning-driven meetups are attracting audiences across generations, not just Gen Z.” 

Event marketing doesn’t always need to have dedicated events campaigns if you don’t have the budget to stretch, especially if the event is free to attend. If your other campaigns are strong enough and you have clear signposting to the event on your website, you can expect to see cross-campaign conversions. 

However, more traditional awareness channels aren’t to be ignored. You might have the biggest brand name in the world, it doesn’t mean audiences will know about your specific events. To fill the top of the funnel, deploying OOH, TV and even programmatic display can support the rest of your event marketing activity. You need to make sure you have activity centred around awareness and consideration, otherwise you will be limiting the pool of people who live in the consideration part of the funnel.  

The event marketing industry in 2025 remains an ever-changing beast and marketing will need to keep adapting to continue seeing growth.  

Marketing Insight

Once a fierce competitor to Intel in the CPU market, AMD had slipped into distant second place by the mid-2010s.

The early 2000s had been a golden era, but when Intel’s Core architecture launched in 2006, AMD struggled to match its performance and efficiency standards. By the early 2010s, AMD’s situation was awkward. Its latest FX processors failed to meet expectations, often losing ground even to older Intel chips. Market share in desktop and laptop CPUs had dwindled to single digits. For many, AMD had become synonymous with “budget only”, a brand used when cost mattered more than performance.  For the wider public, AMD was unknown compared to Intel’s distinctive audio branding.

Financially, the company was in trouble. Layoffs, restructuring and a revolving door of leadership added to the issues.

Enter CEO Lisa Su, who was appointed in 2014. Su led the company’s refocus on its engineering efforts. Codenamed “Zen,” the new CPU architecture promised to be a complete reinvention designed with one aim in mind: compete with Intel on raw performance.  By doing this, AMD hoped to regain market share and reverse its brand image of being “budget” rather than “excellent value”.

Accelerating Growth

By addressing its brand image through product development, competitive pricing and a deliberate marcomms strategy, AMD was able to reverse its negative position. In the year since launching its first generation Ryzen CPU, AMD improved YoY growth and market share by 14%. By 2019, its revenue had increased from $4.3B to $6.48B, reversing a 27% drop in revenue that had been seen in 2015. As a result, AMD’s market share of mobile CPUs (including Laptops) went from 6.4% to 20% by 2020.

This month’s day in the life comes from our new business director, Nicole Browne, who shares what her early days in PR taught her about storytelling and how one pitch team managed to make her tear up like a proud parent.

We’d be remiss not to give ourselves a cheeky new business plug here. So if you read this and think that MI Media sounds like an agency you’d like to work with to grow your business, then get in touch at [email protected].  

What led you to a career in media?

Balancing my academic and creative sides was always my aim when trying to figure out what I wanted to do. Having studied fashion promotion at university, I realised that while I didn’t live for fashion, I enjoyed the opportunities to write and tell stories that the modules on PR offered so initially looked for jobs in this industry.

In those first few years of my career as a PR executive I had to find compelling stories in everything from abandoned shopping basket retargeting (we sent and retrieved an actual shopping basket from the edge of space), to the online deal-hunting forum HotUKDeals (one shopper filled their freezer with 300 ice creams for just £17.36 after they spotted a pricing glitch which saw ice creams going for pennies at Tesco Express). It taught me so much about how to tell stories that people want to read.

Eventually, I joined an agency that specialised in PR for the advertising & media industry. Here I worked with clients including MediaCom, Ogilvy and Leagas Delaney, before being approached by a recruiter at Omnicom Media Group UK to run its PR as part of its new business and marketing team. It was this in-house role that broadened my skills and showed me the opportunities that lay in agency new business and marketing. After a few years moving around the OMG UK network, I came over to the side of the indies at MI Media.

What does a typical day look like for you?

My role puts me in the very privileged position of being able to work with pretty much every single person in our agency. One day might see me working with a group of Business Directors to develop the conversation for an upcoming client roundtable event, another might involve working with one of our more junior team members to uncover their specialist knowledge and support them in writing an insightful article for our website.

I am by far my busiest when a new business pitch hits. One of the fantastic things about MI Media is that when this happens, everyone is all hands on deck. It’s not just about the pitch team in these moments, but about the rest of the team picking up work to support those on the pitch and make sure that no one is at risk of burning out. I love everything about a pitch; they bring the absolute best out of everyone. I feel like a proud parent when I send the team off for the final pitch presentation after weeks of research, story building and rehearsals. I was so impressed by one pitch team during their final rehearsal that they managed to make me cry, which as a ‘stoic Yorkshireman’ is quite the feat.

What mistake have you learnt the most from?

Although I’m an open and direct person, I have fallen foul of worrying too much about other people’s opinion of me. As I’ve grown into my leadership role, I’ve had to learn that there will be times when I have to be firm, either with the team or in my own convictions. Not everyone is going to react positively all the time, but their reactions aren’t a reflection of who I am. As long as I truly believe in my recommendations and actions, I’ve learnt that I need to stand by them. And honestly, I can’t think of anyone who’s held a grudge against me for any of the decisions I’ve made at work!

Who’s your role model and why?

When it comes to work, I like to pick and choose what I admire or appreciate in the people I work with and try to emulate them. However, there’s one person that stands out for me who’s been doing incredible things over the past few years: Saffana Monajed.

I first met Saffana at OMG UK where she was a Media Planner at OMG Unite. Since then, Saffana has set up WhiteBoard Marketing Co., running writing workshops that get marketing teams excited about writing for their organisations. Not content with launching an incredible business (while becoming a mother of two!), Saffana is perhaps more recognisable as a voice on social media breaking down in the simplest terms how the marketing machine works. More specifically, how the Israeli government is using well known marketing tactics to get the West to buy in to, or at least stay silent, about the genocide in Gaza. Other people trying to build their client base in an industry still dominated by white, middle class decision makers might have shied away from a topic like this. But I defy anyone to watch Saffana’s videos and not develop a better understanding of what is happening, while also learning about some genuinely great marketing tactics that can be applied to their own clients.

Beyond this, the network of women that Saffana has built around her and that I’ve had the pleasure of meeting is full of incredible people. This, I think, is the best reflection of a great role model.

Marketing Insight

Currys, one of the UK’s most recognisable electrical retailers, faced the challenge of staying relevant in a market increasingly dominated by online-first competitors like Amazon. Its traditional brand positioning wasn’t working for younger audiences.

To move forward, Currys needed to shift away from adapting old marketing tactics for a new generation and instead focus on creating native, engaging content that meets younger consumers where they are, on the platforms they use every day.

Accelerating Growth

In repositioning itself as a content creator, Currys has connected with a younger digital-native audience. A lot of its successful posts were organic, meaning paid media budgets were likely saved and deployed to other areas where that budget was needed more.

Currys’ strategy paid off, the content drove 100 million organic TikTok views in six months and more importantly a 5% increase in sales in the 17 weeks to 24 August 2024. Currys has firmly established itself as a standout social brand in the industry.